Confronting Sin in the Church

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Well, I saw a news story this week about an unfortunate person somewhere here in Oklahoma. I don’t remember exactly where, but they were trying to deep fry a turkey. And those things scare me to death anyway.

You see all kinds of YouTube videos about things that can go awry with those turkey fryers. And they were trying to deep fry a turkey on their front porch and evidently stepped away for just a moment and their house caught on fire. I don’t think it was a total loss.

But in the story, they were talking about how prevalent this is. And the story said that half of house fires result in some way from cooking. And a third come about because somebody left whatever cooking appliance unattended.

You can’t do that. I still get in trouble for the smell that I left in our house when I left Black Eyed Peas unattended. and forgot about them.

Well, Charlotte was pregnant, by the way, so every smell bothered her. You cannot leave. There are some things you just can’t leave unattended.

And we’ve learned this as well from Abigail. Many of you know Abigail, our two-year-old. You’ve probably heard her and seen her.

I got spoiled with the other four kids because they were pretty good about staying out of stuff when they were little. But if you turn your back on Abigail for two seconds, she will redecorate and remodel the house. There were a couple times this week I stayed with her so Charlotte could go do something else.

Stayed with her for a couple hours, just me and her, and it was exhausting. You cannot leave her unattended for a moment. There are some things in life that we just can’t leave unattended or dangerous things happen.

And that’s the way the Apostle Paul talks about sin in the church. You just can’t ignore it and let it go on. You can’t just turn a blind eye and say, well, you know, it’s fine, it’s over there.

It’s one of those things that’ll burn your house down, the way Paul talks about it. And so this morning, I want to come to 1 Corinthians 5, where he deals with this subject. And if you’re a guest with us this morning, seems like I’ve had to give this disclaimer the last several weeks, I’m going to give it again.

If you’re here every week, you’re going to get tired of hearing this If you’re a guest with us though, I want you to know that you have not walked into some Enormous problem If you see a title like what was up on the screen confronting sin in the church, you may think what have I walked into? What is about to happen here? I’m not sharing this this morning because of any particular problem I know about in the church I’m sharing this for one reason only We are studying in a systematic way through the book of first corinthians And this just happens to be what the Apostle Paul is talking about.

And I told you all when I started this series that there were going to be some things that the Apostle Paul addresses in this letter that in my flesh are uncomfortable to deal with and are probably going to be uncomfortable for you to hear. But it’s God’s word, so we’re going to hear it. And so we’re going to be in 1 Corinthians chapter 5 this morning, not because of any problem that I’m aware of, but just because that’s where we are.

So if you would, turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 5. And once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you can’t find it or don’t have your Bible, that’s all right. It’ll be on the screen for us.

And we’re going to look at the first eight verses of this chapter where Paul talks about the dangers of sin, the dangers of just letting sin go undealt with in the church. Here’s what he says, starting in verse 1. It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, an immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father’s wife.

You have become arrogant and have not mourned instead, so that the one who had done this deed would be removed from your midst. For I, on my part, though absent in the body but present in the spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this as though I were present. In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit with the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Your boasting is not good.

Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven, so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed.

Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. And you may be seated. So let’s talk briefly about what’s going on here.

Paul has written this letter, as we’ve seen over the last four chapters, he’s written this letter to deal with some of the problems that were going on in the church at Corinth, although he also has some encouraging things to say to them. There were some good things that happened in the church at Corinth. It wasn’t just all bad, but he didn’t have to correct the things that were good.

He also had gotten word about things that were going wrong in the church, and he’s already dealt with the factions, the way people were dividing into different camps within the church, and they were fighting each other, and they were struggling for power, and they were struggling for prominence. He’s dealt with that. He’s dealt with the pride and the boastful attitude that has bubbled up there at Corinth.

Now he’s having to deal with some specific instances of immorality. And we have children in here. So I’m not going to go any further into the specifics other than to say that there was a man in the church at Corinth who had an inappropriate relationship with his stepmother, his father’s wife.

And Paul said, this is not right. You know better than this. He’s looking at the city of Corinth around them.

Paul was familiar with Corinth. He had done ministry in Corinth, helped start the church in Corinth. And Corinth was known as a pretty wicked place.

As a matter of fact, I’m told that the Greeks had a word to Corinthianize, which meant to commit all kinds of immorality. You know, they’d made up a word that you’re acting like those people at Corinth. So the people at Corinth, kind of like our society is pretty hard to shock.

There’s very little you could do in our society that people aren’t going to say, well, you know, if that’s what you want to do, go ahead. Paul is looking at the pagan people of Corinth outside the church and saying, there is sin going on inside the church that is so bad, so scandalous, that it’s even shocking to the pagans in Corinth. He said, do you know how hard that is to do?

And it’s one thing for there to be sin in the church, and for the church to deal with it and go on. That’s going to happen. We’re all sinners.

We’re all fallen creatures. There’s going to be sin. If we think this church is without sin, we’re kidding ourselves.

We’re all sinners. But there’s a difference. I think when we sin, we feel bad about it.

We get right with the Lord. We get right with one another. They were flaunting it.

And some historical clues in the book and elsewhere indicate that maybe we’re talking about somebody who was wealthy and powerful and influential in the church. And so everybody just kind of looked the other way and said, it’s not worth challenging him because we don’t want what’s going to blow back on us. And maybe to the point that they were boasting about the fact that, hey, this wealthy, powerful individual is part of our church.

That’s part of what they were boasting about. We know from chapter four that they were bragging about how spiritual they were, even in contrast to the apostles, they were saying, we must be so spiritual because look at how influential we’ve become. Look at how wealthy we’ve become.

Look at how well we’re doing. And Paul’s saying, wait, we’re apostles and we’re being hunted down like dogs. We’re being killed.

We’re being, okay, if you’re that spiritual, show us how it’s done. And here he says, you’re bragging about your spirituality. You’re bragging about how close to God you are and you’re allowing this to go on unchecked in your church.

And so he writes to the church about the importance of dealing with this sin. Now, if you’re new, I want to clarify too what sin is, because sin is one of those church words that doesn’t get used a whole lot outside of this context. Sin is anything, I’m going to use the definition they give the little kids at camp because I think it’s a good one.

Sin is anything we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God. It’s a pretty all-encompassing definition. It’s anything that we do that displeases God, and the world will say, why is that such a big deal?

It’s because we’re taking the God who created us, the God who loves us, the God who sustains our every breath and heartbeat, we’re taking the only, holy, just, righteous God, and we’re taking the place that belongs only to Him in our lives and in our hearts, and we’re giving it to something else. And maybe that idol is ourself, maybe that idol is our desires, maybe that idol is money or relationships or whatever, but we’re taking something that is not God and putting it into a place that only He deserves to occupy in our lives. And that’s why sin is always a big deal, even a little sin.

And so we’re looking at sin running rampant out in the open in the church, and He’s talking about the need to deal with this sin. Another thing I want to clarify is that He’s not talking about going on a witch hunt here. This is not a license for us to just go and say, what are you doing wrong?

And we’re after somebody. We’re going to catch you doing something wrong. I’ve quoted several times here, Lavrenti Beria, who was Stalin’s secret police chief that said, give me the man and I’ll show you the crime.

You show me who you want to get and I’m going to find something they’ve done wrong. This is not that. This is not us trying to police each other’s every thought, and behavior.

Sin is always a big deal, and God always expects sin to be dealt with, but what he’s talking about here is sin that’s out in the open, that people in the church may be flaunting. He’s talking about sin that is habitual. It’s an ongoing thing. It’s a way we’ve chosen to live our lives.

It’s not, oh, somebody messed up one time and we’re going to nail them. This is an ongoing thing that they just think is okay. It’s unrepentant of saying, I don’t care what God’s word says.

I don’t care what the church believes. This is what I want to do. And it’s within the church.

This is also not a hammer for us to go after people outside. What this passage is, is a reminder to us as God’s people that we should be practicing what we preach. If you want to, if you want to narrow it down to where it’s really simple, this is us as the church telling us to do and practice what we say is right.

And it doesn’t mean that we’re going to be perfect at that. We are all going to fall short at this every day. But there’s a difference between that and taking those moments where we stumble and fall and getting right with God and getting right with one another where we’ve wronged each other.

There’s a difference between that and getting prideful and arrogant in our sin and saying, I don’t care what God’s word says. I don’t care what the church says. This is what I want to do and I’m going to do it.

I don’t care. And to tolerate that It sounds safe, but it’s dangerous. To tolerate sin sounds safe, but it’s dangerous.

And the reason I say it sounds safe is because a lot of us don’t like to rock the boat. I would ask who in here doesn’t like conflict, but most of us tend to be a little timid at that. So I’ll ask who does like conflict.

Anybody who says, let’s just blow it up? I know there’s a few of you because I’ve talked to you. You know, the conflict needs to happen, let’s go.

That is not me. I’m willing to have conflict if necessary. I’d much rather find a diplomatic solution.

And so sometimes it just feels safer because we don’t like the conflict. We don’t want to confront anybody. And so sometimes it’s just easier to let things go.

And a lot of churches have fallen into that trap. It seems like the safe thing to do to say we’re just going to ignore it. We’re just going to let it go.

But it’s actually dangerous. And there’s a few places in this text that it’s outlined why it’s so dangerous just to let these things go. And the first of all is that tolerance towards sin endangers the church.

It’s a danger to the church. He says in verse 6 here, to the church, your boasting is not good. Their prideful attitude, they were spiritually proud, they were spiritually arrogant.

But he says, do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? And I’ve taught this for years when he talks about leaven, that he’s talking about yeast. There’s a little bit more to it than that. They would make a loaf of, or they would make a batch of bread, and they would leaven it with the yeast, and then they would keep some back to ferment, and it would be kind of a starter for the next batch of bread.

Think of it like sourdough bread. And as a matter of fact, somebody bought me once a bread kit where you’ve got this airtight container, and you make the bread in the container, and then you save a little bit of it in the back of the fridge to start your next batch, and it gives it a good flavor. That’s the leaven.

And when you mix it in to the next batch of bread, it permeates through there, it spreads, it does its thing, and you save a lump of that for the next batch. What he’s talking about here is not just the leavening, but sometimes that lump can go bad. And you put that in your bread, it’s going to spread through the whole loaf and it’s going to make the whole loaf of bread bad.

Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? So he’s talking about the yeast spreading through the dough, but he’s also talking about the rancid lump of leaven spreading through the whole thing. That’s why he talks later about cleaning it out, getting rid of it.

He says to them in talking about the leaven and the dough, there was probably the thought that it’s just the one guy. It’s just the one guy doing this. It’s not that big a deal. But this was going on in full view of the people, in full view of the community, this scandalous behavior.

And there is a sense in which all sin is the same. Okay? All sin is the same in the sense that it all is enough, any bit of it, whether large or small from our perspective, is enough to condemn us and separate us from God because it’s all idolatry and it’s all a violation of His law.

Big sin, small sin, however you want to define those, they’re all the same. There is another sense, though, in which the Scripture differentiates between different kinds of sin. Certainly, we know that certain sins have graver implications than others.

We know that some sins have bigger consequences than others. And Paul, in particular, talks about the dangers of sexual sin, and that’s what was going on here. So they were looking at this and saying, well, it’s just the one guy, it’s just a little bit of sin.

Paul’s saying this is such a scandalous behavior that even the pagans outside don’t practice these things. Even they’re shocked by it, and yet you’re still boasting about your spirituality. And he warns them that what they’re doing is taking a very cavalier attitude toward this.

They’re treating this as something that, oh, it doesn’t matter. It’s not important. But they were being short-sighted in that because if it was left unchecked, it was going to spread to infect everything around it.

I saw this on Friday, not with sin necessarily. Well, I mean, you could say it was disobedience. I was helping with the car line on Friday as the school let out, and it was raining.

And they kept moving the kids back toward the wall to get them out of the rain because not everybody wanted their kids wet and soggy when they picked them up. I didn’t care. But anyway, they were moving the kids back toward the wall.

And Jojo came over and was talking to me and showing me stuff in her backpack. Now looking back on it, I think she was just maneuvering to get closer to the rain so she could stick her hand in it. And I’m kind of oblivious.

Amen? Yeah, okay. My wife can testify to that.

So she’s sticking her hand out in the rain and she’s talking to me and I’m not even caring or thinking about it. But we let that one kid do it. And it’s like breaking the seal. They all start migrating over this way.

And that happened a couple times. Okay, everybody get back on the wall. then one of my children would migrate over toward me, and I’m not paying attention or thinking about it.

They’re in the rain, and you let that go. Finally, I got wise to this, no, you have to get back over there. Because if you let it go with one, it’s going to spread.

Now, is that to say that everybody in Corinth was going to start having an improper relationship with their stepmother? No. But, you know, if that’s okay, if we’re just going to let that go, then all this other stuff is going to be okay, too.

And so he’s warning that if you leave it unchecked, it spreads until it gets into everything around it. Because that’s our human nature. And so it was a danger for the church to let this go.

And so for us today, we have to recognize that trivializing sin in our midst is only going to encourage its growth. When we see things out in the open that are being done in rebellion to God and His Word, and they’re being tolerated in the church, that’s only going to encourage it to happen more. And we don’t get to turn a blind eye to that and say, well, it’s okay, it’s just a little bit.

Because it’ll endanger the church. But it’s not just the church, it also endangers the sinner. It endangers the one who’s doing it.

See, we have to consider this man, we can look at this man and say, oh, what a terrible person, look at what he’s doing. This man’s soul was in danger, and Paul expresses concern for that in, admittedly, it’s a tough love kind of way, but he expresses concern about that. He says in verses 3 through 5, For I on my part, though absent in the body, but present in the spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this.

By the way, this goes back to what we were talking about in chapter 4. The Bible doesn’t tell us not to judge anything. It talks about the dangers of the way we do it.

Paul here says, I’ve already judged this according to God’s word. What needs to be done here? As though I were present in the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled and I with you in spirit with the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

This man was in real jeopardy as well, because if he could go on with this kind of attitude of not caring about his sin, of saying, I’m going to do what I want, I don’t care what God says, there’s a chance that he is floating through life thinking he belongs to Jesus Christ, thinking he’s a believer and he’s lost as he can be. Because the Bible does teach that as Christians, we will not be able to continue on in sin. It doesn’t mean that there comes a point of time in our lives that we will never sin again.

What it means is that we will not be able to continue on in that kind of lifestyle of rebellion against God and just be okay with it. You and I will very likely sin every day as long as we remain on this earth. But there’s that constant repentance and there’s that constant restoring the fellowship with God that has been hindered by our sin.

There’s that desire for things to be right again. Every time I sin, there’s that feeling that I’ve let my father down. And there’s nothing I want to do more in that moment than go to him and ask for his forgiveness.

That is not what this man was doing. And if you can go on for an extended period of time in embracing sin and say, I don’t care what God wants. I don’t care about being right with God.

I don’t care about there being peace and the fellowship being restored and all that. There’s every evidence that you don’t belong to him in the first place. And that’s not me who said that.

That’s the Apostle John. This man here was continuing down a path that was dangerous for him. And the church can’t, when it says turn him over to Satan, we’re not talking about torturing him.

We’re not talking about putting a curse on him and saying, you’re Satan’s now. This is kind of a euphemism for putting him out in the cold, taking the umbrella of spiritual protection of the church off of him and saying, you’re acting like you’re part of the pagan world. You’re no longer part of the church.

You’re out there. Doesn’t mean that they were supposed to treat him badly either. Doesn’t mean that they were supposed to be mean to him, to be cruel to him.

But they were supposed to put him out and say, you cannot be part of this fellowship if this is your attitude. Because it was a way for him to understand the gravity of the choices that he was making, the gravity of the road that he was headed down. In my years of ministry, three times, I have been part of a church discipline situation.

And let me tell you, it’s never fun. By the way, it was always as the pastor, not the one being disciplined, if that concerns you at all. Three times.

And it was always a heartbreaking experience. Sometimes we hear church discipline and we think of ways we’ve heard that abused or seen that abused in the past where people were out to get each other. It should never be that way.

One situation was over a doctrinal issue where there was a woman in the church who was persistently teaching people that they had to follow the Old Testament law in order to be saved. Paul deals with that in Galatians and calls them Judaizers. We went through the steps.

She wouldn’t stop. We had to say, you cannot be part of this church. The other two times it was over sinful behavior.

unrepentant adultery. One time a man, one time a woman, both of whom I was very close with, and it broke my heart. The explanation, as we work through the scriptures on this topic, though, with the church, we made it very clear the goal here is not to get these people.

It’s not to satisfy ourselves with, you know, that we were the flaming sword of justice here, But it was intended to be a wake-up call that this is not okay. And that we cannot go on as part of the church while living this way. And so there was the idea of putting them out of the fellowship that Paul outlines here, turning them out of the church in hopes that that would wake them up.

In one case, it did. Because he says here, the goal is so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. to shake somebody out of the stupor of temptation, out of the numbness and blindness and sin, to shake them out of that and make them realize the danger of the road that they are headed down so that they will repent, so that they’ll have an opportunity to repent while there’s still time.

And so for the sake of the one in the sin, we can’t tolerate it. I’ve heard this given as well outside the church, heard this explained as well. There’s a woman that I’ve quoted many times to some of you, Rosaria Butterfield, who is now a Christian author, was at one point a college professor.

She may still be a college professor. I don’t know that that’s something you have to repent of. But she was at one point a college professor, an atheist, and a lesbian.

And she talks about her friendship with a Bible-believing pastor and his wife. And I have to specify Bible-believing pastor because they’re not all. who made friends with her and spoke into her life the danger of the road she was headed down.

And she talks now about how, now that she’s come to faith in Christ and he’s turned her life around, she talks about how if they had just said, oh, everything’s fine, that would have given her permission to continue down a road of sin. We have a responsibility to consider the danger that it places somebody in, or keeps somebody in who’s in sin, when we just say it’s fine. And again, here we’re talking specifically about things going on within the church.

It also endangers a watching world. Because we go back to verse 1 and he says, It actually is reported that there is immorality among you, and immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father’s wife. This scandal was widely reported.

Paul was something like 600 miles away. He was at Philippi. I got out Google Maps the other day and saw how long it would take to walk from Corinth to Philippi.

He’s about 600 miles away. And word had gotten back to him about what was going on. Everybody in town knew what was going on.

And it shocked them. I’m sorry, 400 miles away. It shocked them that something so outrageous was going on in this church that even they, with their pagan festivals and their partying lifestyle, even they didn’t practice these kinds of things.

And they’re looking at the church and saying, really, that’s what you believe? That’s what you do? And the church already had a bad reputation among the pagans because rumors were started to no fault of the churches.

Rumors were started looking at the Lord’s Supper that Christians were practicing cannibalism because they didn’t understand the symbolism of the body and the blood. They didn’t understand all of that. And so people were finding reasons to reject the gospel.

And Paul says, what is going on here that the church has decided we’re just going to treat like that’s just normal now, that’s just reality now. Even the pagan world looks at it and says, that’s wrong. Can’t you see how wrong that is?

And the world that was looking for an excuse to reject the gospel was finding one because of the way they were treating this. Because the gospel is the message of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the forgiveness and the change of life that we can have as a result of that. Here’s the gospel.

Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures. He was buried. He rose again the third day according to the scriptures.

And he offers salvation by grace through faith. And it changes us. And our lives and our testimonies, the way we live our lives is a testimony to the world around us about the power of the gospel.

When some of you have told me that you lived rough lives before Jesus and he has so changed you that I can’t even imagine you living the lives that you described. When people see that and they saw who you were before and they see who you are now and they see the change, that is a testament to them of the power of the gospel. You are demonstrating the power of Jesus to change lives through his shed blood and his resurrection.

But when the world looks at us and sees that not only are we no different than we started out, but maybe in some cases we’re worse than when we started out, they look at it and they have another reason to say, I want no part of that. Now to an extent, that puzzles me. Because the gospel hinges on the death and resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact, as a historical event.

And I’ve told you before, 2,000 years ago, Jesus either walked out of the grave or he didn’t. And the way anybody acts or does anything today has nothing to do with that. But the world doesn’t recognize that.

They don’t realize that. Many times they’re paying attention to what they can see in front of them first. The first understanding of the resurrection, the first understanding of that new life that many people have is to see it lived out in us. And if we say, oh no, sin, that’s normal, it’s okay, it’s just part of it.

We’re denying the reality of that new life. Now again, it doesn’t mean that we’re perfect, but part of the new life is that thing within us. I shouldn’t say thing.

It’s that Holy Spirit who lives inside of us, who calls us to repentance. The reason why we feel bad when we sin and the lost world doesn’t is because the Holy Spirit lives within us and calls us back to that new life, calls us back to that path we’re supposed to be on. And so when we let sin just run rampant, unchecked, we endanger the watching world because we’re denying the very reality of the gospel we profess to be changed by.

I want to give you a couple things just as we prepare to close here. Tolerating sin weakens the purity and the unity and the witness of the church. It was shocking to the community because they knew it was wrong.

Verse 1 tells us how shocking it was. It threatened to spread, as verse 6 tells us. And he goes back in verse 6 to that discussion of the arrogance.

We can see that it was part of what drove a wedge between the people at Corinth. If we start fussing and fighting with each other, there’s going to be sin somewhere behind that, making that happen. And so there are all these dangers, all these reasons why sin has to be confronted.

That word confronted doesn’t mean it has to be confronted in a mean way, in an angry way, but in a loving way, we are supposed to hold one another accountable. You are supposed to hold me accountable. That’s why I tell you all the time, if what I’m living and what I’m teaching don’t line up with this, call me out on it.

Okay, this is not a one-way street here. We, as a body, are supposed to hold one another accountable, And a faithful church must deal seriously with sin in its midst. He told him that. He said, deliver the man over to Satan.

Again, put him out of the church for the destruction of the flesh. He needs to feel the consequences of what he’s done. He says, to clean out the old leavens so that you may be a new lump.

The sin that threatens to infect everywhere, just clean house. For the Corinthians, that was a call to them to look inside themse